Oceanic Religion

Chip Callahan

“I believe water will be one of the most pressing
environmental, economic, social, political, and strategic issues of the
twenty-first century.” – Mark C. Taylor, Refiguring
the Spiritual: Beuys, Barney, Turrell, Goldsworthy (2012)

I want to thank Mike Pasquier for inviting me to contribute
some thoughts concerning water and the study of religion. Mike has been posting
some intriguing things about his
own work on the Louisiana coast and the volume that he edited, Gods of the Mississippi, posts that
point beyond themselves to the potentialities of a water-based perspective on
the study of religion in America. The Mississippi, in particular, its
connection to New Orleans, and its outlet into the Gulf of Mexico have long intrigued
me as a possible site for problematizing received narratives of American
religious history. If, as
Perry Miller and Sacvan Bercovitch have argued, the American mind is the
Puritan or New England mind writ large (and, of course, there are many reasons
to reject this formulation), then the Mississippi River is America’s main
artery. If the historiography of American religion has been biased towards
understanding religion in terms of belief and
thought, qualities that match better to
the Puritan or New England Mind model, then a Mississippi Artery perspective
would find a practice-based approach
more appropriate and illuminating. It would also require historians to center
their sights on the material and cultural exchanges that were the foundation of
movement up and down the River and its tributaries.

While
rivers in the national interior turn our attention toward new ways to imagine
the places and practices of religion in America, and possibly push our
methodological creativity, my own work has been taking me offshore into the
ocean itself. I’ve been exploring the nineteenth century whaling industry
for what it might inspire in the way of thinking about American religion. This
was one of the largest industries of the early- to mid-nineteenth century,
peaking in the 1840s. The busiest port of the whaling trade was New Bedford,
Massachusetts, where whaling ships would set out on voyages often lasting three
or four years that took them throughout the Atlantic and the Pacific. Whalers
meandered throughout the Pacific as they hunted their prey, stopping off at
many Pacific islands to gather supplies. They interacted with Pacific Islanders
(as represented by Queequeg in Moby-Dick, for instance) and both European and
American missionaries. They entered into trade relations with many of these
entities. And they brought the experiences (and cargo and people) back with
them to New England, even as they took New England to the Pacific. Here’s an
impressive visual mapping of the global expansiveness of this industry.

My project begins in work, continuing my explorations of the
religious performances and productions of cultures of work. I have been
interested in three aspects or “scales” of religion involved in the whaling
industry: first, the lived religion aboard ships, including how the specific
setting of life at sea and the work of whaling was reflected in and informed by
religious practice; second, the ground (or sea) level “comparative religion”
that went on as whalingmen interacted and exchanged with members of various
cultures, societies, and religions; and third, the impact of these experiences
back home in New Bedford and beyond. Yet, just as their work carried whalingmen
into new worlds that required different ways of seeing, so my research has led
me to view the history of religion in America differently.

Most fundamentally, the view from offshore complicates the
foundational categories of nation states and landed masses that typically frame
historical narratives. While nations do not drop out completely, they are
peripheral, spatially, to the oceanic geography. What is typically negative
space – the ocean, accounted for only as space to be traveled over on the way
to somewhere else – becomes positive space where life happens. Even the whaling
ships that may have belonged to American owners were crewed by a mix of people
from the United States, Africa, the Pacific Islands, and elsewhere.

As Hester Blum, a leading advocate of the recent “oceanic turn” in
literary studies, has written,
“If methodologies of the nation and
the postnation have been landlocked, in other words, then an oceanic turn might
allow us to derive new forms of relatedness from the necessarily unbounded
examples provided in the maritime world.”

The view
from the ocean positions religious studies in an intercultural matrix of
material and cultural exchanges that requires seeing beyond particular national
narratives, “provincializing” American religious history and American
religious studies and opening the door for more complicated stories that push
beyond the Atlantic World paradigm into global networks. But further, a
religious history that takes the space of the ocean itself into account is
unable to ignore the ways that the physical space of religious practice
matters. Space here, on a whaling ship in the open ocean, was not metaphorical
or symbolic, it was a sort of material agency shaping potential and creating
limits, informing the possibilities of engagement that might mobilize religious
idioms or be considered “religious.”

The
unavoidable presence of the spray and smell of the sea, the wind, the sun, and
the ship, not to mention the whales that were the reason for men to be working
and living in this place to begin with, also drives home another point: it is
not only human history that matters here, but natural history as well. Studying
religion on the water compels attention to the intersections of human and
natural history. Human civilization – in this case, American industrial capitalist
society – cannot exist without the labor of converting natural resources into
human products (light, fuel, fashion, etc.).

The
intertwining of human history and natural history through this labor of
resource extraction (whether it be hunting whales, mining for coal, drilling
for oil, planting and harvesting crops, or any number of other labors) brings
me to my final consideration. Mike Pasquier’s work has documented how the environmental changes wrought by centuries of human activity that
are catching up to us now in the form of global climate change and rising sea
levels are part of our religious history. As Walter Benjamin
has noted, “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the
way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up
at a moment of danger.”

The problem of how to narrate the history of our
current climate crisis is something that has recently caught the attention of
historian Dipesh Chakrabarty. In an article titled “The Climate of
History: Four Theses,” Chakrabarty wrestles with what it might mean to
rethink our historical consciousness and methods to take account of nature as a
part of our critical history. “The
crisis of climate change calls for thinking simultaneously on both registers,
to mix together the immiscible chronologies of capital and species history,” he
writes. “This combination, however, stretches, in quite fundamental ways, the
very idea of historical understanding.” He presents the following theses, elaborating
brilliantly on each:

-Thesis 1:
Anthropogenic explanations of climate change spell the collapse of the age-old
humanist distinction between natural history and human history.

-Thesis 2:
The idea of the anthropocene, the new geological epoch when humans exist as a
geological force, severely qualifies humanist histories of
modernity/globalization.

-Thesis 3:
The geological hypothesis regarding the anthropocene requires us to put global
histories of capital in conversation with the species history of human beings.

-Thesis 4: The
cross-hatching of species history and the history of capital is a process of
probing the limits of historical understanding.

It seems to me that religious studies as, at least in part, the
study of “experiments in being human,” as David Chidester has described it, and
in part the study of classification and categorization, as Jonathan Z. Smith or
Russell McCutcheon see it, is poised to grapple with this new formulation of
the human as species in ways (historical, social, cultural, material) that
other humanistic disciplines may not be.

The study of religion in, on, around, and through water,
whether that water be rivers or oceans, places the human practice of religion
in particular material, physical contexts, and provides an opportunity to
consider human cultural and social history in relation to natural history.
Extending Chakrabarty’s theses, I suggest that understanding our present will
require exploring not only the intersections of the global histories of capital
and the species history of human beings, but also the religious idioms through
which humans oriented themselves to each of those historical modes, informing
and being informed by them.

I am excited to learn about the work of others who are
exploring religion in relation to watery spaces. If the oceanic turn in
literary studies is any indication, I think the study of religion may benefit
greatly from the questions and perspectives that may emerge.

Thanks, Mark. Linebaugh and Rediker are certainly pioneers in the field, taking maritime studies away from an emphasis on naval military history and instead putting the sea front and center in exploring the histories of the nation state and capital. I'm suggesting that an oceanic perspective also gives us different kinds of leverage on the history of religion -- not only the history of "religious people," but also the history of the emergence of modern theories of religion from those same global oceanic networks. Is this "American religion?" That's one of the intriguing issues this perspective raises. How are expected boundaries constituted (or resisted, or ignored, or reformulated) in the context of such global flows?

Very exciting stuff, Chip. As an oceanic Shakespearean, I'm very interested to see how this American project develops. A few titles you might enjoy, if you've not seen them already -- Kim Patton, *The Sea Can Wash Away All Evil*, Catherine Keller, *Face of the Deep*, the Melville-y poems in Athony Caleshu's *Of Whales...*...

Also, with apologies for self-promotion, my *At the Bottom of Shakespeare's Ocean*, and eventually a new book on shipwreck that will have a chapter on sermons/theological explanations.

Good to hear from you, Steve. I've actually read your blog! Very exciting stuff that you're doing, too. I'm looking forward to reading both the Shakespeare book (which I have on order) and your work on shipwreck.

Exciting project! Two stories from Nantucket that support your argument of the ocean as a place for category defiance and cultural exchange: 1st. Thomas Coffin (Lucretia Mott's father), a Quaker whaling captain, carried a gun with him on voyages 2nd. The Spanish seized one of Coffin's ships near Chile, and he spent three years trying, and failing, to get his ship back. On his return he "offered a warm-hearted defense of the Catholics of South America."